Tag: Alberto Manguel

‘Apologia’ with Rave

by Nicolette Stasko Writing A blog (short for weblog)[i] is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries or ‘posts’. It’s interesting that Blog is also be used as a verb, meaning ‘to maintain or add content to a blog’. ‘The emergence and growth of blogs in the late 1990s coincided with the advent of web publishing tools that facilitated the posting of content by non-technical users’ (Wikipedia). I hope I’m not stating the obvious. I’m not normally a blogger nor a bloggee. (BLOG is such an ugly word!) This is a…

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The Novel

by Aashish Kaul There is a line in Alberto Manguel’s With Borges where, reminiscing about his childhood, Borges reveals how in those days he would regularly accompany his father to the National Library in Buenos Aires and, too timid to ask for a book, would often simply pull out a volume of the Britannica and read at random. This is how he said he learned in one day about ‘the Druids, the Druzes and Dryden.’ The brief statement is delivered by the ageing writer in his typical casual manner, but its intent is clear: a reader can derive all of…

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The Suitcase

by Aashish Kaul Sergei Dovlatov’s comic masterpiece The Suitcase begins with the author’s brief, pathetic conversation with a clerk at the Russian Office of Visas and Registrations (the ‘bitch at OVIR’, he refers to her in anger), conducted in the course of pointless, exhausting formalities that were involved in emigrating from the erstwhile Soviet Union. Dovlatov describes this exchange with characteristic satirical flourish, an exchange essentially about the quota of suitcases allowed to an emigrant. ‘Only three suitcases? What am I suppose to do with all my things?’ But a week later, while packing, he finds that he needs just…

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